Marano Lagunare / Maràn

... small castle, it doesn't count two hundred souls, it’s on this side of the Tagliamento, located on the Marina towards the south, eighteen miles from Udine, twenty from Aquileja, by water from where you go to the Anfora river; it’s a very strong place with walls and embankments, very wide ditches where the Navy enters, and you can cruise around in a galley...

So writes a Friulian Count in the second half of the 16th century, when Marano, first a patriarchal fortress, then under Venetian rule, had now returned in the hands of the Serenissima after a thirty-year interval under imperial protection in the aftermath of the war of the League of Cambrai.  

Today, practically only the Moro bastion remains of the ancient walls, but the "herringbone" city layout, centered on a north-south road axis between the Porta de Mar (Sea Gate) and the Porta dell'Oro (Golden Gate) from which various lateral alleys lead to courtyards and backstreets, keeps the structure of the past intact. The alleys still recall important events of the past (via Sinodo the schismatic assembly gathered here in 591 with the patriarch of Aquileia to cut ties with Rome, allying itself with Constantinople, calle Turchia the defense project against the Ottoman incursions of the 15th and 16th century or perhaps, on the contrary, the longing to reach the Bosphorus that grips anyone who looks out onto the Adriatic at least once in their life), but more than the alleys are the casoni, wooden houses dispersed along the shores of the lagoon, the casoni made up of elm, acacia or tamarisk wood covered with straw and marsh reeds, the casoni with a rectangular plan with rounded corners both in the perimeter and in the roof, to become a single large hood for the fireplace to warm the fisherman returning from autumn fishing, during the eel season, or in spring, during sea bream season... more than the alleys are the casoni to remind me of something unexpected: I often think about why in Medea Pasolini chose to represent the exterior of Corinth with the fortress of Aleppo, especially since I learned that while Pasolini was there filming, in 1969, the protagonist of our performance, Muhammad, was four years old and played football every day with his friends at the foot of that same fortress; but now in front of this uninhabited casón, on a patch of sand in the middle of the lagoon, I suddenly remember that the film actually begins here, in a place similar to this, and I recall the centaur Chiron saying to Jason “Everything is holy, everything is holy, everything is holy! There is nothing natural in Nature, my boy, keep that in mind. When Nature appears natural to you everything will be over and something else will begin. Goodbye sky, goodbye sea!”...

I look up, a group of egrets returns silently from the sea, the white of their feathers standing out in the blue gray of the sky, which is the same blue gray of the sea: then as now, at least for a moment, everything is holy.